Last week, more than 2000 people played IFTF’s most recent Foresight Engine game, Learning Is Earning 2026, following a keynote by game designer Jane McGonigal at SXSWedu. The starting point for the game was a scenario about a blockchain-based educational system called The Ledger, which uses edublocks to certify learning from all kinds of activities: https://youtu.be/DcP78cLPGtE…;

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. - See more at: https://www.macfound.org/programs/fellows/strategy/#sthash.xbVY6FHz.dpuf

About this Blog So: a mere 23 years after discovering the World Wide Web at TVOntario, this is my first real blog post. It's taken a while to distill my thoughts. 8-> I'll be leveraging my edtech-soaked obsessions with digital identity, online community, lifelong learning and career development, and this will be a combination of… | Workplace Learning

The Open Badges project is growing up. We’re now in our 5th year, so in many countries around the world, we’d be about r…

Val Thomas's insight:

The Open Badges project is growing up. We’re now in our 5th year, so in many countries around the world, we’d be about ready to enter school. There has been a continuous community gathered around this technology from the very start, populated by dedicated individuals, organizations, companies, nonprofits, and foundations. We came together in 2014 to form the Badge Alliance, to stake a claim in this belief that when we build a distributed ecosystem of educational credentials together, we will give people the tools to manage their digital footprints themselves, without requiring a relationship with any one particular mega-corporation. We believe that by working together in the open, we can build systems that improve access and equity of educational and career opportunities.

Project CRedIT was launched in 2012 to help researchers get recognition for all their contributions to a research project - from securing funding, through carrying out the research, to writing up the results for publication. Learn how ORCID, Mozilla Science Labs, and others are making the Project CRedIT vision a reality.

“ A recent report published by McKinsey indicates that the digital talent marketplaces driving the so called “gig economy” could play a significant role in increasing global GDP by $2.7 Trillion by 2025. With billions of dollars already flowing through these platforms I’m surprised that they aren’t a bigger topic of discussion in the recruitment industry.The “on demand” workforce is growing and increasing global skills shortages (particularly in the digital sector) are fuel to the fire. There are”
Via David Green

Here's what the latest psychological research says about learning styles and the things that shape them.

Val Thomas's insight:

WHO WE ARE SHAPES HOW WE LEARN. In colloquial terms, it's much the same as having a "hungry mind"; in Google's, it's being a "learning animal." To some extent, that's everyone. But what Google has in mind when it uses the phrase to describe its ideal employee is someone who's constantly trying to learn new things. They know what they don't know and think of those deficits as knowledge gaps they're always striving to fill—which keeps them asking "why?"

The Markle Foundation, LinkedIn and the state of Colorado team up on a jobs site that seeks to create a common, skills-based language among job seekers, employers and education providers.

Val Thomas's insight:

Skillful features career-growth tools such as a federal site that helps job seekers build a profile of their abilities and match them with possible careers. It also offers “deep dive” guides for the competencies that are useful in specific professions, an edX course on acing interviews and a portal to creating a LinkedIn profile. In addition, the site refers job seekers to career coaches, whom they can speak with via phone, for free. The coaches work at the Larimer County Workforce Center or at Goodwill Industries. They received additional training to participate in the Skillful project. The LinkedIn-powered site Markle has created is the first example of what Ryan Craig calls a “competency marketplace.” Craig, managing director of University Ventures, an investment firm, and the author of a recent book on “unbundling” in higher education, said Skillful’s backing by the coalition of a major foundation, local government and LinkedIn make it a significant development. “This is the most important and certainly underrecognized development in higher education,” he said.

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN Updated March 14, 2016 12:01 a.m. ET 2 COMMENTS Last fall, Barclays PLC began testing a new tool for attracting young job applicants: a mobile videogame. More than 4,500 mostly college seniors have played the Barclays-branded version of Stockfuse, a free stock-trading game that uses real-time market data. About 8% have applied for positions at the international bank, and so far 17 have landed jobs. Stockfuse, developed by SHFuse Inc., a New York-based startup, is just one of a new breed of apps that invite people to play games that also serve as real-world recruiting tools. JOURNAL REPORT Insights from The Experts Read more at WSJ.com/LeadershipReport MORE IN WORKPLACE TECHNOLOGY How I Tamed the Email Beast at Work Ten Rules of Etiquette for Videoconferencing How to Get the Most Out of Virtual Assistants The Key to Getting Workers to Stop Wasting Time Online Wearables in the Workplace Bring Legal Concerns Such apps aim to shed light on how a candidate might perform in a job based on how he or she performs in a game. With Stockfuse, for example, what stocks a player invests in and the returns achieved typically provide plenty of data for consideration. Games from other developers range from solving mazes to managing a simulated sushi restaurant. Depending on the game, app developers build a detailed analysis of a player’s abilities and share them with the interested employer. An evaluation might tag a person as a potential leader for showing tenacity and grit, or discount another’s abilities for making snap decisions and showing poor judgment. PLAY YOUR OWN GAME These sites offer games used in recruiting. Stockfuse.com Knack.it Pymetrics.com Some games take just a few minutes to play, while others can go on indefinitely, with players picking up wherever they left off each time they log in. The idea, says Guy Halfteck, founder and chief executive of Knack Inc., a recruitment-and-evaluation app developer, is to measure a job candidate’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that’s fun for that person. Truer measure? Knack was founded in 2010 and says it now has more than 200 employers that use its three mobile games for recruiting, including Daimler Trucks North America LLC and Royal Bank of Canada. SHFuse landed Barclays as one of its first employer clients after participating in a startup accelerator program that Barclays helped run. Pymetrics Inc. is a more recent addition to the sector and has about a dozen recruiting games. ENLARGE Employers, for their part, say the games can give a more objective picture of a candidate than traditional candidate-screening tactics. There is no acting, as there often is in interviews, or self-reporting, as in a personality test. “The hardest part of assessing talent is that [job candidates] have been trained so well,” says Alison Keefe, a university-relations manager at specialty coffee company Keurig Green Mountain Inc. In a typical interview, many provide the kind of answers that employers are looking for, but those responses aren’t necessarily candid, she says, so it can be “hard to get past the veneer.” Last spring, Keurig began asking job applicants to play games like Bomba Blitz, from Knack, to be considered for mostly entry-level engineering positions. In Bomba Blitz, players must outsmart fiery invaders by slinging water balloons at them with varying degrees of power. More than 275 candidates have been asked to play Bomba Blitz or one of Knack’s other two games. Nearly two dozen have been hired. “It supports our impression of people or gives new information,” says Ms. Keefe, who uses a special online application for hiring managers to review the results. Players also come to such games on their own, either through the websites of the app developers or through app stores. Some will play because an app offers them career-aptitude advice and other kinds of evaluations as part of its service. Others play in an effort to get noticed by employers, who pay fees ranging from 99 cents to review a single candidate’s gameplay to more than $15,000 a month for large companies that do a lot of hiring on a regular basis. Games and gamification By using mobile games, employers are tapping into a growing trend. People played them on average more than two hours a day in 2014, up 57% from 2012, says research firm NPD Group. Videogames in general are fairly common in workplace break rooms today, and gamelike mechanics are baked into many company training programs, a practice known as gamification. Still, using games as recruiting tools has its flaws. Job seekers might not take the games seriously enough, experts warn, or they may get the impression a company requires employees to jump through arbitrary hoops to get ahead. “When you apply for a job, that’s a pretty high-stakes situation,” says Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Games are inherently fun, Prof. Plass says, so using them as a hiring tool “is potentially very confusing” for candidates. To be sure, employers say they aren’t basing hiring decisions solely on how candidates perform in a game. “They’ve only just started to gain traction,” says Karl Kapp, a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.” “There is not a huge body of science behind them at all.” Desired traits These kinds of games are based on years of research and development and use sophisticated algorithms for measuring traits in players such as perseverance, motivation and grit. Last year, Muhammad Jabakhanji was asked to play Knack’s Dashi Dash game, which at the time was called Wasabi Waiter, after applying for a position as a senior project manager at consulting company Alpin Ltd. It was the first time an employer ever asked him to play a game to get a job, and he was tasked with running a virtual sushi restaurant. “It wasn’t your normal, boring aptitude test,” says the 32-year-old, who ended up getting hired and now works for the company in Abu Dhabi. “It was tricky,” he says. “You had to really put some thought into it.” Ms. Needleman is a reporter in New York for The Wall Street Journal. Email her at sarah.needleman@wsj.com.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a CASRAI activity that brings together a diverse set of stakeholders with a common interest in better understanding and communicating the different kinds of contributor roles in research outputs. You can learn more about the objectives and drivers for this initiative in the background section. CRediT is an open standards activity aligned with the OpenStand principles to which CASRAI is a signatory

“ A recent report published by McKinsey indicates that the digital talent marketplaces driving the so called “gig economy” could play a significant role in increasing global GDP by $2.7 Trillion by 2025. With billions of dollars already flowing through these platforms I’m surprised that they aren’t a bigger topic of discussion in the recruitment industry.The “on demand” workforce is growing and increasing global skills shortages (particularly in the digital sector) are fuel to the fire. There are”
Via David Green

In this series, professionals explain how to lead in times of turmoil or growth. Read the posts, then write your own (use #HowILead in the body of your post).I was asked recently about my leadership style and what makes a great leader. As Peter Drucker said years ago, stable times require excellence and good management. As we transition to a new age, our organizations need more; they need leadership. So managers shouldn’t just manage. Today they need to lead and think of themselves primarily as

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.